Bergson, Complexity and Creative Emergence

David Kreps

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137412201
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

This is a book about evolution from a post-Darwinian perspective. It recounts the core ideas of French philosopher Henri Bergson and his rediscovery and legacy in the poststructuralist critical philosophies of the 1960s, and explores the confluences of these ideas with those of complexity theory in environmental biology.

1

Introduction

This is a book about evolution.

It may seem that the arguments about what evolution is have all been played out – over a hundred years ago – and that Darwin’s version of events is today challenged only by the religiously devout. But the truth is that Darwin’s version of events is itself challenged by the orthodox neo-Darwinism popularised by such figures as Dawkins, and that not only is there a long tradition of other ideas about evolution, there is today a very strong case to suggest that Darwin’s was only part of the story – and not even the most important part at that.

This is a book about two alternatives to orthodox Darwinism that turn out to be both closely related and mutually reinforcing – and which both uphold Darwin’s version of events as a secondary force. One derives from late 19th/early 20th century French philosophy; the other from contemporary complex evolutionary biology. I set out in this book to describe both these alternatives in terms understandable by as wide a range of scholars as I am able: both to inform those aware of philosophy concerning the developments in environmental biology; and, perhaps more importantly, vice versa. In the process I will also need to tell the history of our understanding and use of the term ‘system’: it turns out that this is crucial to how we understand evolution.

The philosopher who is the focus of our attention is Henri Bergson (1859–1941). Bergson’s ideas are enjoying something of a revival in various circles. He has, in the past, had many critics; and there remain – in this author’s eyes, at least – some elements of his work that have not stood the test of time (for example, elements of the second part of his last work, Two Sources of Morality and Religion), and some arguments that remain very controversial, (such as over the relativity of time and space in Duration and Simultaneity). Nonetheless, there have been developments in both philosophy – in particular, poststructuralism – and in scientific endeavour – for example, some of the discoveries of contemporary neuroscience – where Bergson’s ideas have, despite early criticism, proved far more accurate than his detractors’.

Contemporary evolutionary biology has been one of the principle sites for the development of the sciences of complexity, in the latter part of the 20th century. This development was greatly accelerated by the enormous advances in computing in the late 1980s and 1990s, and complexity science has spread to multiple sites and down multiple avenues, with the results disseminated from its multiple sources to equally multiple audiences during the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. In evolutionary biology computer models of molecular and biotic networks have given enormous insight into the workings of the natural world.

These advances prove to be a further reason to revisit the ideas of Bergson and see where, in like measure, his early critics may have been mistaken, and some of his primary arguments in fact much more cogent and powerful than at first thought. This book is not my attempt to suggest that ‘Bergson was right all along,’ or that ‘Bergson saw it all first.’ I shall not, either, spend much time discussing his critics, or those elements of his work that have not stood the test of time – in my eyes at least. It is clear that, within the confines and context of late 19th and early 20th century scientific achievement and European culture, there was much that Bergson cannot have seen and must, perhaps inevitably, have missed. Nor can one volume address the whole range of the new sciences of complexity – let alone in the context of the ideas of a French philosopher.

This book attempts, nonetheless, to suggest that there are elements of the philosophical perspective which Bergson brought to understanding the world – and specifically evolution – that chime exceedingly well with some of the core arguments of complexity theory found in its stronghold of environmental biology. Indeed, Bergson’s ideas not only seem to underline and validate those scientific ideas with philosophical argument, but to expand upon them, suggesting to us a broader picture, with implications even wider than the sciences of complexity – already broad – have yet reached. Crucially, this perspective suggests an even further break from past approaches that the complexity sciences have yet to embrace; but which, when seen through the lens of Bergson’s perspective, make cogent and compelling sense.

In short, the trajectory of the complexity sciences in post-Darwinian evolutionary biology is supported and clarified by some of Bergson’s ideas, and – I argue in this book – we can gain a great deal of further insight from considering the two together. Ultimately, Bergson’s concept of creative evolution (as described in his famous book of the same name), underpinned by his earlier works, may have both found scientific verification in contemporary complex evolutionary biology, and have further – fundamental – messages that complexity scientists should heed. In the end, I suggest a new understanding, which I have called creative emergence: it combines elements of Bergson’s approach and that of the foundational ecological complexity theorists’ into a new poststructuralist understanding of evolution, and of our place in the world.

Bergson viewed his work as a collaborative research project between science and philosophy, with the common aim of understanding life. His evolutionism, and his philosophy in general, he said, ‘will only be built up by the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers also, completing, correcting and improving one another.’¹ This book is my attempt to further this ‘collective and progressive effort’.

This first chapter briefly reviews the life of the French philosopher, his legacy, and offers an abstract of the rest of the book. The second chapter details those of Bergson’s core ideas of most relevance to the argument of this book. The third chapter reviews the rediscovery of Bergson at the foundation of poststructuralism, and some of the more recent scholarship around his ideas. The fourth chapter offers a poststructuralist genealogy of systems thinking as it has grown and changed since the 19th century, up until the advent of complexity. The fifth chapter, after addressing the question of time in classical and quantum physics, places the ideas of complexity theory and those of Bergson side by side, and posits a new approach which combines aspects of both. The sixth and final chapter offers a brief conclusion, with a consideration of our place in the world.

On Bergson’s life

Henri-Louis Bergson was born on 18 October 1859 in Paris to a Polish Jew – a music teacher and composer – and a Jewess from the north of England, thanks to whom he was familiar with English from a young age.² Coincidentally, 1859 was the same year as the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Following a typical Jewish education he attended the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. While at the Lycée Bergson won prizes for his scientific work, and in 1877, aged 18, won a ‘national prize in mathematics’³ for the solution of a mathematical problem, which was published the following year in the Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques – his first published work.⁴

At 19 he entered the famous École Normale Supérieure, where he read and became enamoured of the work of polymath and materialist Herbert Spencer. His education included the fields of literature, the natural sciences and philosophy, and ‘the scholastic record he left behind him was one of uniform brilliance.’⁵ Obtaining the degree of Agrégation de philosophie in 1881, he became a philosophy teacher at the Angers Lycée, in Anjou. In 1883 he moved to the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferraud, where he gave courses on the Presocratics, particularly Heraclitus. It was here that a major change occurred in his thinking, setting him against his earlier love of Spencer. In a letter of 9 May 1908 – to American pragmatist philosopher, William James, with whom he had a long and cordial association – Bergson provided a short paragraph on ‘events worthy of note’ in his life, of which he said there were none in his career, and only one, on the subjective side:

I cannot but attribute great importance to the change which took place in my way of thinking during the two years which followed my leaving the École Normale, from 1881 to 1883 ... . It was the analysis of the notion of time, as it enters into mechanics and physics, which overturned my ideas. I saw, to my great astonishment, that scientific time does not endure, that it would involve no change in our scientific knowledge if the totality of the real were unfolded all at once, instantaneously, and that positive science consists essentially in the elimination of duration.⁶

As if to underline this shift, in 1884 he published a translation of Lucretius’ poem, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), with his own commentary attached, already exploring what Gilles Deleuze would later describe as a counter history of philosophy.⁷

Returning to Paris in 1888, Bergson taught at College Rollin, and then at the Lycée Henri-Quatre, where he read Darwin and gave a course on his theories. His time in the provinces had not been wasted, however, and on his return to Paris he submitted his doctoral thesis, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, which was published in 1889 (appearing in English as Time and Free Will in 1910). His Latin text, Quid Aristoteles de loco senserit, also published in 1889, was submitted alongside it.

In 1896 Bergson published Matière et mémoire, (which appeared in English as Matter and Memory in 1911) and in 1898 he was able to leave the world of lycées behind, and was appointed Maître de Conférence (roughly equivalent in the UK to the post of Reader, or to the US Associate Professor) at his old college, L’École Normale Supérieure, where barely a year later he was promoted to Professor.

In 1900 he was awarded the Chair of Greek and Latin Philosophy at the Collège de France, ‘one of the highest academic posts in the nation’.⁸ His essay Introduction à la métaphysique was published in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in 1903 (appearing in English as Introduction to Metaphysics in 1913), and in 1904 he was appointed as Chair of Modern Philosophy, which post he kept until retirement.

His most famous work, L’Evolution Créatrice, was published in 1907 (appearing in English as Creative Evolution in 1911). This work was highly celebrated and made him a figure of international repute: ‘People from all over the world came to Paris to hear him lecture, which he did with the same grace, felicity of phrase and originality of thought exhibited in his books. Yet neither the widespread adulation, nor the many honors he received had any effect on his modest, unassuming personality. Like all genuinely great men he possessed true humility of soul.’⁹ So famous did he become that, between 1909 and 1911 ‘over two hundred articles about Bergson appeared in the British Press alone’¹⁰ and he gave lectures in Oxford and Birmingham in 1911, and in New York in 1913. His popularity was riding so high among Catholic modernists that Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and others sought ‘to put Bergson’s works on the Catholic Index of prohibited material. They succeeded in 1914 – the same year in which Bergson was elected to the Académie Française.’¹¹

Bergson enjoyed, then, until the outbreak of the First World War, the life of an extremely successful academic. But in 1916 his life took an unexpected twist: ‘the French government entrusted him with a series of diplomatic missions, first to Spain, and then again decisively, to the United States, in 1917.’¹² This diplomatic voyage to the US was to try to convince President Woodrow Wilson to bring America into the war. ‘To what extent his effort influenced events is difficult to assess,’¹³ but the personal relationship Bergson formed with Woodrow Wilson continued during the drafting of the treaty of Versailles, in which Bergson ‘continued to serve as a key intermediary between the French and American governments’.¹⁴ Thereafter, his main ‘post-war political contribution was his work with the Wilson administration to establish the League of Nations’.¹⁵ The League was an intergovernmental organisation, founded in 1920 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Bergsons Core Ideas
• 3  Bergson Redux
• 4  Systems Theory Grows Up
• 5  Dure Complexe
• 6  Creative Emergence
• Glossary
• Index